Girolamo Crescentini (February 2, 1766–April 24, 1846) was a noted Italian male castrato mezzo-soprano. February 2 is the 33rd day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1766 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... April 24 is the 114th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (115th in leap years). ... 1846 was a common year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar). ... A castrato is a male soprano, mezzo-soprano, or alto voice produced by castration of the singer before puberty. ...
Barbier, Patrick. The World of the Castrati: The History of an Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon. Trans. Margaret Crosland. Suffolk: Souvenir Press, 1996.
Richard Somerset-Ward. Angels and Monsters. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
If anyone could have competed with Marchesi as a popular hero, it would probably have been GirolamoCrescentini, the handsome young soprano from the Marches around Urbino (though, unlike Marchesi, Crescentini did not age well: by the time he was forty he was decidedly portly and heavily jowled).
Crescentini was a musician first and foremost: he specialized in the expressive patetico style of singing that was generally more fashionable at the turn of the century than Marchesi's constant bravura.
Crescentini himself spent the last thirty-four years of his life as a celebrted teacher, first in Bologna, then in Naples, where Isabella Colbran was one of his pupils.
In the classic situation of the young girl who doesn?t intend to marry the rich braggart, preferring instead a timid and penniless youth, the plan excogitated to discourage the unwanted suitor is to lead him to believe that the girl is, in fact, a young castrato (or, in the then current, ‘proper’ form, a ‘musico’).
However, castrati like GirolamoCrescentini and Giambattista Velluti were still highly appreciated in operatic circles, while the theatrical columns continued to carry, throughout the 1700’s, reports of infatuations of male audiences for young castrati who, performing in feminine attire, were easily mistaken for beautiful young girls (see Balzac’s Sarrasine).
At any rate, the subject matter survived the scrutiny of the censors; what caused the most embarrassment was, on the contrary, the dialog created by Gasbarri, the deliberately extravagant vocabulary, full of clumsy neologisms, puns, scurrilous double entendres, expressions which varied from silly to absurd to exagerated or linguistically unheard of.
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